Saturday, January 21, 2012

So I'm new to the world of git and Github, so I'm trying to figure out how all this stuff works. Making things more complicated is the fact that I'm using Eclipse and its egit plugin, but most of the documentation on working with Github assumes that you're working with the command-line version of git. Although there is some documentation on how to use egit with Github, it mostly assumes that you created your own repository in git for your own projects. Github encourages people to take an existing project, fork it, and then work with your own copy of the repository though. This then makes things difficult when you need to pull in changes from the original master repository and stick them in your own repository.

Again, there is documentation on how to do get your forked repository in-sync with the master repository, but I'm still trying to feel my way about how to do this in Eclipse with egit. So far, here are some sets of instructions that seem to work with Eclipse Indigo 3.7 (but I'm still feeling my way around though, so I could be wrong).

So I'm assuming that you've forked a repository on Github, and you've successfully used the egit defaults to make a local repository based on your fork. So in the Git Repository Exploring perspective of Eclipse, you go into your repository.

In the Remotes section, right-click and choose "Create Remote"

Set the name to "upstream" and configure it for fetch

the URI should be set to the git URI of the original master repository on Github that you forked

"Add" a RefSpec

the source should be master, and the destination should then be automatically filled in to refs/remotes/upstream/master

Save your changes

In the Remotes section, expand the upstream configuration, right-click the green incoming arrow, and choose Fetch

After fetching, I think the latest changes are now available in your local repository, so now you want to apply those changes to your local branch, and then push them out to your forked repository

So make sure you have your local master checked out or whatever

Right-click your repository and choose Merge...

Merge in from upstream/master

And then you can push everything back into your forked repository on Github with a simple Right-click on your repository and Push.

It looks like egit might also support some sort of special Upstream configuration or something, so that egit will automatically track the master version of a fork, but it looks like the forked repository needs to be configured a special way, and I don't know how to get Github to do this. I imagine if you dig into egit's property files, there'll be some way to enable it, but I can't figure it out yet.

Monday, January 16, 2012

I have a small website for teaching kids to program, and I've long wanted to translate it into French and other languages. Being a website geared towards kids, the website has lots of diagrams and figures. Many of these diagrams contain text, so I would need to new versions of about 100 diagrams for each additional language I wanted to support with my website. Obviously, sitting around redrawing the diagrams for each new language would be impractical, especially for languages that I'm personally not familiar with. So I need some system that will let me define my diagrams in a generic way, substitute in different translations for the text, and then generate different versions of the diagrams for different languages.

The crux of the problem is that text might be different sizes in different languages. In English, you might use one word to describe something, but another language might use 5 words to describe the same thing. As a result, the diagrams need to lay themselves out differently depending on the size of the text. I've been trying to find a tool to do that, but I've been having problems figuring out what terms to use in the search. Right now, I'm just trying to understand what sort of tools are available in the space or, given that I probably have to write a chunk of code to substitute in the text translations anyway, how hard it would be to write a simple one from scratch.

Internationalization is a common problem in user interfaces, so coders commonly use a constraint-based layout scheme for their user interfaces in order to avoid this problem. Basically, you have some simple patterns or templates that define how UI elements should be arranged with respect to one another, and then you stick UI widgets into those templates. So you might have a row of widgets, or a grid of widgets, etc. This doesn't necessarily work too well for diagrams because the layouts tend not to be as rigid as in UIs. I was thinking that I could build a more complex version of the system where the diagram designer simply inputs arbitrary layout constraints (e.g. the right side of this element should touch the left side of this other element), and then everything would be fed into a solver of a linear system of equations to get the final layout.

I'm a little concerned though that it might get tedious describing all of the constraints needed to solve a full system. Plus, these constraints might be too rigid in that you can't say, "I need a circle as big as possible to fill that space between the elements" or "make the font size as big as possible as long as the width isn't too big." Of course, doing something like that might require a system that uses linear programming or some other mathematical optimization technique underneath, and it might be tricky to translate constraints from a diagram design into the proper set of inequalities and objective functions without totally confusing the diagram designer.

There are various "constraint-based diagram editors" available, but most of these tools are designed from drawing large graphs (e.g. org charts). Given a bunch of inter-connected diagram elements, these tools will use spring systems or other techniques to find a good planar embedding of the graph. Some of my diagrams could be laid out this way, but I'm not sure if this approach is simultaneously too heavy and too underpowered for the types of diagrams I want. My diagrams don't really fit into those graph models, so I'd be worried that the mismatch of diagram types would make it difficult to get the results I wanted.

I also looked at some constraint solver systems that I could maybe build up into a diagram tool since that would give me the most flexibility in terms of how constraints could be expressed. Unfortunately, constraint solvers are actually a technical term used to refer to specific AI-like problems like SAT, etc. They specialize in solving binary constraints. Although they can also work with real numbers, it seems that some of them solve the problem by discretizing the real number line and then using standard binary constraints to solve things.

Perhaps what I need is some sort of symbolic computation engine that can work with intervals. Does that even exist? Perhaps I'm going overboard with this whole diagramming thing.